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Bill Horne wrote: | On 1/6/2014 11:30 PM, Bill Horne wrote: | > Thanks for reading this. | > | > I'm a member of the Big-8 Board, which decides what Usenet groups are | > created and deleted. We have both technical and non-technical | > members, and we've been using MediaWiki for the board's website | > (http://www.big-8.org/) until now, but we have to move the site to a | > new server which doesn't offer it. | | Thanks to all for your help: I've just gotten off the phone, and the | decision has been made to go in a different direction. We have a | volunteer who wants to learn "native" HTML, and so we'll be setting up a | "static" site without a CMS. | | I appreciate your time and advice. | Bill Heh. For some reason, I'm reminded of that classic cartoon showing all the ways that various "experts" designed and built their interpretation of what the customer wanted, which was a tire hanging on a rope from a tree branch. I had a similar case recently. I've helped a few nonprofits build web sites, and several have started off looking into Drupal, Joomla, etc. After a month or so of this, with nothing working, I've combined a few scripts that I've collected or written anew with a few of their designs for the pages they want, and in a week or two they were happey with the results. But the fun part is after that, when we were discussing what they really need, and why my stuff was still too complex. Finally, I've persuaded a few of the orgs' members to try my idea that they learn a bit of HTML. Of course, they've looked at HTML manuals, and run terrified from the incomprehensible technical gobbledy-gook that they saw. HTML is this horrible stuff that mere mortals don't stand a chance of understanding, right? But I persuaded them to try a few experiments. I start them with a few plain-text docs that look like the pages they want, and show them that these "work" when put on the web, but cause problems on various screens. Smart phones are nice for this demo. Then I show them the effect of wrapping them in a simple <html><body> ... </body></html> wrapper, and adding <p> tags between paragraphs. "Hey, that's really simple; why didn't anyone tell us that?" Then I show them a few more tags, <b>, <i>, and then the all-important <a href="..."> tags. And they're off and running, building some of the pages they want. I keep emphasizing that they should just learn it "one tag at a time". The result has been that the orgs' web sites are now run by a few of their members that have learned just enough HTML to do the job. I have to teach them a bit about debugging a page, of course. And some of them have even started to learn basic CSS. Their sites are often rather impressive to interested visitors. I attribute this to the fact that they're mainly concerned with getting their information online, and view HTML as a tool to make it readable on visitors' screens, whatever size they might be. This won't work for every org, of course. Some of them actually need wordpress or drupal or whatever. But a fundamental problem is that people often don't know what they need, and are prone to being taken in by people who want to sell them the ultimate solution to all the world's Web problems. So maybe what we need is a reliable way to determine when static pages with simple markup are sufficient, and when we need a high-powered Solution to complex marketing problems. But I don't know how to translate people's amorphous desires into requirement specs. I suspect nobody does. -- ------------------------------------------------------ _' O <:#/> John Chambers + <jc at trillian.mit.edu> /#\ <jc1742 at gmail.com> | |
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